Wanna be a little less alone today? We'd love for you to drop in and say hi through the Kind Words 2 demo.

We've put together a slice of the upcoming game for everybody to try out!

• Have short chats with other players in the neighborhood!
  
• Go in to the bookstore and swap media recommendations!
  
• Hop in to the clothes store and try on all the (totally free) clothes!
  
• Give names to strange cats!
  

Dear Kind Words Players,

We invited you to discuss your worries with strangers.

It could have gone badly. But, you wrote each other millions of uplifting letters.

You made Kind Words an unlikely success. So we're inviting you back for more....



More ways to talk to people.



More ways to be creative.



More ways to be yourself.




Coming in 2024! Wishlist and signup for the playtest today!

For more thrilling details, please hop on over to the new Kind Words 2 page. It would mean the world to us if you wishlist it today. Thanks.

Since this news item is specifically going out to Kind Words players, I want to explain how we're NOT splitting the community and how we WILL be supporting the original Kind Words.

Along side all its glorious new features, Kind Words 2 includes a remade version of the original game that is fully backwards compatible.

[h2]Kind Words and Kind Words 2 players can send letters back and forth to each other.[/h2]

Every new Kind Words 2 player is also a new Kind Words player. Everyone is on the same server. Your letters, your stickers and your favorites are waiting for you no matter which version you play.

We're very excited to have everyone join us in our new lofi city. We've finished a lot of the game, but we've set aside time to gather feedback from people and make it even better. One of the ways we're doing that is using Steam's playtest feature.

If that excites you, please checkout the KW2 page and sign up!

Yours,
Ziba and Luigi

PS. Clark is back with a whole new soundtrack!

Ok, now this is just getting silly. Kind Words has been out for four years and people are still writing THOUSANDS OF LETTERS EVERY DAY.

Well then, I guess we'll keep updating it!

Thanks to the big server overhaul we did last month, we can add something people have been asking for from the very beginning:

[h2]Favorites![/h2]

You can now curate a collection of your favorite airplanes and letters that you have received.

See an airplane you want to hold on to? Click favorite. Don't worry, You're making a copy. Its good vibes will still float on to the next person.

Really love a response you got and don't want to dig through your whole inbox to re-read it every time? Favorite it!

To read your favorites, just click the new heart icon.



Currently you are limited to having 500 favorites. We will be looking at feedback, player behavior and server load to see if that's the right limit. You can always remove favorites to make more room.

We've also added a handful of other improvements, because, gosh darn it, you're worth it.

[h3]Full Changelist[/h3]

• Added a favorites system
  
• Moved the screensavers button to the "more" section
  
• Updated help page text and links
  
• Letter response font will auto-size if it's too long to fit on the page
  
• Changed the quit icon from a pillow to an open door
  
• Changed the decorate room icon from a face to a room
  
• Made camera grain effect stay constant with screen resolution changes
  
• Made the request input field behave like airplanes and responses when reaching the size limit
  
• Fixed a soft lock that could occur if making a report failed
  
• Fixed an issue checking the validity of a sticker granted by a thanks
  
• Replaced Twitter link with
  
• Removed the "3 Year" badge. Cause it's 4 years now.
  

[h2]Short version: [/h2]

Gotta turn off Kind Words for a few hours to update the server.
Also, there's a small, fun update to the game coming soon.

[h2]Long version:[/h2]

If you've been following along with our folksy little updates all these years, you may be familiar with this theme: We didn't expect Kind Words to be popular and I didn't design the server thinking lots of people would actually use it. That caused some growing pains for all of us.

A few years ago I started rewriting the server for better performance and extensibility. I don't want to jinx it, but I've actually tested the new server for high loads unlike when we launched the current one.

It's going to take a few hours to do the upgrade because our database is around 7 gigabytes in size and I don't want to lose any of your messages. So first I'm gonna backup the existing database, which takes about a half hour. Then I need to convert the database to my totally redesigned format. That should take about an hour.

Let's assume something will go wrong, double that and add a little and I'm estimating 4 hours.

Boy do I hope nothing goes wrong.

The best thing about this server update is that it will let us do some new things with the game. And I know that everyone longs to open steam to be greeted by a monologue about server upgrades, so to thank you for your attention, I'm going to reward you with a tease for our next game update: we're adding a "favorites" system so you can curate your own little collection of the kindest of words.

Players have been asking for a record for ages. Sorry it took us a while to get here, but we wanted do it right.



Records are about the music (and you'll get Clark's beautiful tracks), but they're also a keepsake. A physical manifestation of your personal connection to a feeling you love. That's why we crafted this as a little bundle of the best parts of Kind Words made real.

That's why you get:

• Clark Aboud's lo-fi & dreamy tracks
  
• A choice of "Pink and Violet Firefly Swirl" or "Midnight Purple Mixtape"
  
• Two postcards to write nice letters on and send to people!
  
• A sheet of stickers from the game! You could put them on the postcards!
  
• It's like you're playing the game in real life!!!
  
• Heartfelt letters from the team!
  

This week marks 3 years since Kind Words launched! That's 3 years and over 5 million letters and airplanes shared between strangers lifting each other up. While it's amazing to us that Kind Words found an audience, it's shocking and humbling to us that you're all still here! After all this time, you're still writing thousands of messages every day!

I still can't believe we get to facilitate this wacky experiment-turned-way-of-life. Luigi and I try to honor that privilege by moderating the game 7 days a week. Being such a small team, we're especially grateful to the community members in game, discord and forums who help with questions.

One funny side effect of the never ending parade of new users is that statistically unlikely problems become, well, more likely! Lightning strikes, cosmic radiation, internet gremlins, literal bugs inside computers. None of those seemed important to prepare for in 2019 when we were making a game we thought 100 people would play.

Anyways, that's my excuse for why a mangled save file could confuse the game and prevent it from running. Today's update includes a much better effort at making Kind Words save files fault tolerant.

If Valve accidentally turns all your cloud saves in to cat jpgs, Kind Words will no longer overwrite your local save with it and try to load it.

If you cut and paste a recipe for baked cod over your local save file. Kind Words can't bring it back. I'm not magic. But at least now it won't just stop working, it will open the save file manager and explain that it can't read the save file.

We also included a cute little 3 year celebration emblem on the title screen.

Thank you so much for being a part of this. Your support has motivated and empowered us to keep Kind Words running and to work on other projects, some public (wishlist Cyrano!) and others that we're not ready to talk about just yet

Keep on being kind.

Yours,
Ziba & Luigi

How sexy is that, right? We added a save file manager!
Even better: I recommend you never ever use it!
Wow! These updates just get better and better!

In all seriousness, for 99% of people you don't need to ever think twice about your save file. There should be only one and there should be no problem with it.

However, this save file manager is for you if:
* You're on a mac and your save file seems to have disappeared recently.
* You don't use steam cloud but you manually copy save files between computers.
* Something really weird that shouldn't have happened, happened.

This new tool, accessed from the options page, will help you discover and select what save file to use.

Hopefully on to funnerer stuff now!

I finally fixed Steam Cloud Saves on MacOS. Sorry it took so long. I had to do some things. Like get a mac.

As a tiny bonus, I've added a font size slider to the screensaver modes for all platforms.

Fun fact: the screensaver mode was something I wrote in partnership with the Science Gallery in Melbourne for an exhibit they made on Kind Words. I like to leave it running on an old screen in my kitchen so I can walk by and see people's words of encouragement throughout the day and so that I know the server is still running and I don't have to panic.

Technical Caveat:
If you used cloud save previously and then started fresh on a mac without cloud save, your old cloud save file may now come back and overwrite your fresh start. Don't worry, the game will detect this and backup your fresh save as kindwords.json1. You can verify that this is what happened by looking for kindwords.json1 in the same directory that the game will display to you when you use the "export" function.

If that happens and you wish to replace your old cloud save with your fresh start, use the in-game option to completely delete your current save. Close the game and then replace kindwords.json with kindwords.json1.

Hopefully this won't affect anyone and I'm being paranoid. But not losing your letters is pretty important to me. As always, reach me at support@popcannibal.com or discord.gg/popcannibal if you have questions.

I rolled back the tiny change on the mac version due to reports of missing save data. Very sorry for the trouble. Life is a grand mystery and part of that mystery is what the game engine I'm using snuck in to minor point releases of their stable release branch.

Well this is a cute little very specific update. In the last few days we've had an influx of players from China! Welcome!

You're doing a great job being kind to each other, but a number of players have gotten one thing confused: The report button sends messages to ME and LUIGI, the moderators. It does NOT send a message to the person you are reporting. You can't use the report button to talk back to people. Sorry!

This update adds one-time-only message from Ella the Mail deer when you make a report to remind you that you're sending a report to the moderators and not to another player.

I hope this is a proper translation :

You can not reply to people using the "REPORT" button.

REPORT

This update also changes the description on the Abe Lincoln sticker to use the word "enslaved" instead of "slaves", because in this context we are talking about a burden put upon people and not an all encompassing definition of who they were. Thank you to the player who made that suggestion!

There's also a tiny increment in the version of Unity used for this release. Shouldn't change anything. Probably.

That's all for this update. I know it's been a while since we've had a meatier update. It may surprise absolutely no one who follows me to learn that I've been rewriting parts of the backend AGAIN. Lots of invisible work going on behind the scenes to make sure Kind Words has a long life and a stable foundation on which to grow.

Cheers!
Ziba

Wishlist Cyrano now!

Are you enjoying writing nice letters in Kind Words? But maybe you wish you could wander outside of reality for a few minutes and write about a burning, passionate, ill-fated love? Also maybe poke a few dudes with swords? Insult some fools? And collect cards?!

What we've done is make a one hour adaptation of the classic tragicomedy, Cyrano de Bergerac. It's a funny, heartbreaking story about a writer with more wits than beauty who fights the whole world with swords and words.

It's my personal favorite play and my primary motivation for making this game was to spread access to what I know is good in this world.



It's a play about writing, and I thought: I know some people who like writing!

More than just a straight up copy of the play, we've made room for you to be the heart of the production. You will use your words to express your love.



You may have caught a glimpse of this game this spring. Our friends at Fellow Traveller commissioned Cyrano and featured it in their Ludonarracon festival. Well, this winter we're self publishing it for everyone to play. Translated in to 7 languages, no less!



Just like Kind Words, it's Luigi making art, Clark making music and me (Ziba) on the rest. It's short, it'll be cheap, and it's one of the greatest stories ever told. Please wishlist Cyrano now!

Small fixes:

• Stopped the Duck Kami sticker from looking like a Bleeper when you put it on a letter.
  
• Fixed not being able to delete responses if your inbox was sorted by request.
  
• Changing your signature initial used to have a delay before being reflected locally.
  
• Clicking on the version on the title screen now takes you to the steam news page instead of the static game website.
  

[h2]Two years in and over 4 million messages sent![/h2]

[h3]If you're not gonna stop then we're not gonna either![/h3]
New stickers for everybody! You get a three-eyed duck thing! And a sleepy octopus! And .... a jelly...cube...with... bones? Maybe those are french fries.



Because Kind Words is a chill place and strives to be a bit of the opposite of traditional social media, we don't flash a lot of numbers in the game. No online player count. No ticker with announcements or tournaments. (note to self: what would a Kind Words tournament be?) So every now and then we get two questions:

Is anyone moderating Kind Words?

The answer to both is: heck yes, all the time.

Usage goes up and down, but on a slow day, we're still transmitting a couple thousand letters between players.

And we are moderating constantly and always improving our moderation tools. For every update to the game, I make 10 updates to the backend. Faster, smarter, stronger, purpler. Also, we. Hold on. Duck...



Where was I? Anyways, speaking of moderation, with this update we're doing two things to help keep things kind and on-topic.

First, we're letting people directly delete responses they no longer want to have in their inboxes.

Second, we're going to ask you to confirm some things before you try to do them like... are you trying to send a stranger your discord handle? Or your email? And we'll gently remind you that we gotta keep it anonymous to keep it safe.

Full change notes:

• New room!
  
• New stickers!
  
• Added the ability to delete responses you've received.
  
• Sorted unopened letters to show up on top of your pile.
  
• Will ask you to confirm before sending if it looks like you're breaking rules.
  
• Prevented the escape key from erasing what you just typed.
  
• Updated to Unity 2020.3.16
  

Thanks once more for living this wild experiment in caring with us.

Yours,
Ziba & Luigi

In a regrettable and unintentional lapse into excessively Anglocentric behavior, I did not account for the significant portion of the world that uses non-Gregorian calendars.

More clearly restated: It's not 2021 everywhere, in fact it's 1442 some places and those places could not play Kind Words after the last update. My apologies!

Also the screensavers weren't showing more than one airplane in a row. Booo.

So I fixed those things and to sweeten the deal I put a little more spit shine on the Room Screen Saver. Now the camera doesn't just float there, you get a tour of all your decorations while it's running.



Yours,
Ziba

We're at a year and change now and you haven't slowed down! You're still writing each other thousands of messages every day.

We are humbled to have Kind Words become a regular part of so many people's lives and, in keeping with long-standing international custom for developer-player relations, we offer you this traditional gift: a giant, looming beast and some mittens.



In fact, since you've exchanged well over 3 million messages, we are soaring past the the beast-mitten requirement to bring you:

• A new room in a warm wooden cabin with a string of twinkling lights!
  
• Steam trading cards!
  
• 10 new stickers! Each with matching room objects. Including this guy...
  

• More efficient and error tolerant network code.
  
• Autofocusing on text input fields whenever they appear.
  
• The request list is refreshed every time you view it.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause new stickers not to get the big fanfare they deserve when first seen.
  
• The options menu can now be accessed from the title screen.
  
• Lowered the volume. Why was it so loud?
  
• Updated the underlying engine to Unity 2019.4.18.
  
• Showing a "connecting..." message on the title screen if it's taking too long to connect. So that you know what it's up to. It's trying to connect.
  

[h2]Happy Steamiversary![/h2]



It's been a year since Kind Words launched on Steam! And what an incredible birth of a community is has been!

You've exchanged over TWO MILLION messages. More importantly, we keep hearing from people how much those messages mean to them. We'd love to take credit, but you all put your hearts on your sleeves and you all responded. So please take a moment to recognize the gifts you've given each other.

The best thanks that we can think of is to keep it fresh with new content.

[h2]Musical Interlude[/h2]
If you really want to set the mood as you read on about the AMAZING NEW STUFF, here's a treat:
Kind Words' composer Clark Aboud has rearranged one of his favorite tracks, Lavender, for a trio of electric guitars!

[h2]A New Room![/h2]


The new Evergreen room is like bright sunlight filtering through leaves above.

[h2]More stickers for everybody![/h2]

I don't want to spoil all the surprises, but there's an Axolotl and a ghost. And they're cute as fu...n times ahead for everyone!

[h2]Screen Savers! [/h2]

We know a lot of you are leaving Kind Words on in the background to listen to the music or wait for replies. So now you can do that with style. We've included three screen saver modes which fade out the UI and intensify the chill. (One can intensify chill, right?).

Even better, the screen savers have an option to automatically display airplane messages from other players. You've written about 400,000 airplanes. And now you can just relax and let them float directly in to your heart.

Hmm. This is getting a little saccharine.

Good thing I saved the least emotional bits for last!

[h2]Bug Fixes and Improvements![/h2]

That is, unless you get weepy about ultra-wide monitors. Cause baby: we now have much better support for ultra-wide monitors.



Or maybe your heart has been yearning for this little checkbox:


Also:

• Fixed a couple problems preventing Ella from alerting you about new letters.
  
• You can cancel out of reporting a message without selecting a reason first.
  
• No more sending empty airplanes! People weren't really abusing it. But it was silly.
  
• The scarecrow sticker is no longer sideways in a bunch of places. That wacky guy.
  
• Upgraded the game engine (Unity) to 2019.4.10
  
• Somehow the whole thing is a couple megabytes smaller. Not really sure how that happened. Bit gremlins probably.
  

[h2]A Million Letters![/h2]


Kind Words' big hearted players have written each other a million letters.

That's not counting the 300,000 paper airplanes with words of encouragement you've thrown.

No, that's specifically letters written in response to strangers' requests for comfort or advice. Almost every word and every minute of that time was focused on lifting up another person. You players have done something amazing!

[h2]New Room and Stickers![/h2]

The least we could do in response was to stick a cute frog in the game.

Also, we like you so much that we decided to do more than the least. Today we've added

• 10 new stickers
  
• each with a new decoration
  
• and a new blue room in which to enjoy them!
  

• A buffet of graphical options!
  
• You can change the signature that is automatically appended to letters!
  
• A wildly dangerous button for erasing your save game! (It does ask you to confirm)
  

• Big performance improvements for older machines
  
• A warning if you start the game on a computer that's probably too old to play it
  
• Link to the FAQ in help
  
• Minor visual contrast improvements on the help screen
  
• 27.8MB smaller, even with the new room!
  
• Updated to Unity 2019.3
  

It's almost time for an update to Kind Words!

Wholesome Games is having a showcase and we thought we'd chip in a fistful of wholesome by premiering a little trailer for our next update!

Tune in Tuesday, May 26th, 1pm ET to https://www.wholesomegames.com/ and learn the answers to all your burning questions:

• Is it stickers? It's stickers, right?
  
• WHAT STICKERS ARE THEY?
  
• Is there anything more than stickers? That would be neat.
  
• How long are you going to keep me away from my new stickers?
  

How can games change you? How can they weave reality, fantasy and aspiration into something other than escapism? Who got out of their pajamas today?

Happens live at the very start of the festival and then gets re-run till Tuesday. But all the cool audience members (like you) will be tuning in live.

Official blurb!

Panelists: Ata Sergey Nowak, Matthew Seiji Burns, Paula Rogers, Jrg Friedrich Alex Paterson, Ziba Scott

In this exciting panel we explore games and developers that utilize the uniquely powerful medium to create meaningful experiences about real world problems; provoking thoughts, increasing awareness and making an emotional impact to change the world for the better.

LudoNaraCon 2020

More lofi! More chill! More beats!

You may recall that Ella, the female mail deer, has a side gig bringing you fresh tunes every day that you write a letter. Well, she just found SEVEN more tracks. Just keep coming back to write and they're yours.

Mildly compelling backstory
Before launching, I daydreamed: "If this thing actually took off, I'd love to commission more music". Well, you all made my dream come true. Clark Aboud has produced 7 new tracks that go in to the game today.

They have a wider range of feeling, including a triplet of "Connector" pieces that are like deep breathing for your ears.

The new music is also now in the soundtrack DLC plus we've added lossless FLAC format recordings of everything.

More feelings
I'm so honored that people are choosing to spend their time here and proud of all the effort players have made to lift each other up.

Also, I fixed some bugs and tweaked some things!

Full changelog!

• 7 new songs
  
• Added a volume slider for sound effects (really just Ella's voice)
  
• Removed a game stutter when changing music
  
• Fixed a bug which would announce the wrong stickers on game start
  
• Fixed a song ordering issue when viewing the radio after unlocking a track
  
• Fixed the mental health link when composing airplanes
  
• Fixed a tutorial typo
  
• Fixed a bug which made letters with no stickers appear to have the Elegy sticker
  
• Upgraded to Unity 2019.4.11f1
  
• Did, like, 80 million things to the server to make moderation easier and prevent the whole enterprise from melting down.
  

A Quarter Million!

You kind people have already written 250,000 letters to each other!

When we dreamed up this little trust experiment, we never imagined it would get this big. In fact, before launch I did a stress test on the server with 60,000 fake messages and laughed to myself "hah, we'll NEVER get close to that".

(Thank you all for bearing with us through brief server meltdown that followed.)

It has been a crazy few weeks improving the servers, fixing bugs, streamlining our moderator tools, and talking to hundreds people on discord, email, twitter and reddit!

Thank you
It's a bit overwhelming, but we've been lifted up by your enthusiasm, positivity and fan art. More importantly, thank you for what you're doing for each other. It's a privilege for us to be facilitating such heart warming exchanges as are happening every minute through Kind Words.

Now more!
We're blinking the joyful sparkles of astonishment out of our eyes now and getting back to work. THERE WILL BE MORE STICKERS! Just you wait and see ;)

Fun fact, I took so long making that sexy looping celebratory video that you've actually hit 271k already!

You can see the video with sound on twitter

[Kind Words] (lo fi chill beats to write to) is now available on Steam!

We believe people want to lift each other up. This is your chance.

Over the last 2 months our Humble players have written over 50,000 messages to each other in Kind Words. They shared fears, joys, loss, exhaustion...everything. But most of all: encouragement.

oh god I'm so corny.

To celebrate launch day, we've added a few new features. The big one is...

Export to HTML
Now you can click a button and all the letters you've received will be downloaded and saved in a pretty little webpage on your computer.

Other changes

• Room decorations do a little dance when you click on them
  
• Added Australian mental health resources
  
• Remaining line indicator when writing
  
• Prevented accidentally fast closing paper airplanes by double clicking
  

Big update today for Kind Words Steam beta testers and Humble owners!

Paper Airplanes!

One of the weirdest, most wonderful problems I've ever had in my entire game design career is that Kind Words has too many people just bubbling over with kindness and clogging up the request queue with loving statements of support and joy!

What am I supposed to do, tell you to stop?!

So today you get paper airplanes. These airplanes are just the place for you to send your thanks to the world, to an individual, share an inspirational quote, or maybe even just scream and vent some strong emotions.

Your words will fly through everybody else's worlds and everyone can click on them to read our shared stream of thoughts.


Full History
Your inbox only shows you the newest responses to your requests for letters. This helps keep things speedy for the servers. Now there's also a full history browser that will let you chronologically browse all your requests and responses, no matter how many.

More

• Steam cloud saving!
  
• Updated mixes for all music tracks!
  
• Music volume slider!
  
• More reporting options!
  
• Secret stuff that's not unlocked yet but might turn out to be new stickers. Who knows?!